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Influence of Your Work on the World

As I was finishing school, I had a dream – I wanted my job to maximize my influence. I wanted the product of my craft to touch, in a meaningful way, as many people as possible, helping them in small and large ways. It’s mostly pride and desire to maximize the control over your environment: isn’t it awesome when everyone around you knows what you’ve been working on?

“You work on the search engine at Google? Wow, I use that every day!”

“You’re at Boeing developing the new 787? So many people are going to fly on that!”

Very few projects at Microsoft have “small” impact. Everywhere you turn, the projects people are working on are likely to be used by thousands or millions of people. You have the opportunity to earn, save, or cost the company millions of dollars through your work. It’s an awesome responsibility, but an awesome chance to create widely influential software.

I’ve found a hole in this logic: it’s missing a key variable. It’s not just about the number of lives you touch. It’s also about the number of people that are working on this same product. The logic is simple: if there are thousands of people working side by side with you, your individual contribution will be lower. You will own and contribute to a smaller part of the puzzle.

Moreover, for technology projects, I’d argue the number of engineers working on the product has an even stronger, quadratic effect on each person’s influence. Ancient, yet so contemporary book Mythical Man Monthmakes this point well.

Here’s my attempt at quantitatively measuring your work influence number as an engineer in a high-tech company:

Let’s look at some examples:

Microsoft Office is one of the world’s most used products; yet there are quite a few engineers touching it. Spread-out, shared ecosystem of Office Shared services that own cross-product components and installation, as well as groups that own localization and documentation, makes the denominator in the equation above quite high.

Facebook is famous for having a restriction on the number of engineers that can work on a given product; I can’t find references to the exact number, but anecdotally, it’s under 10. So let’s say 10. Let’s look at the example of the Timeline: with Facebook’s 900M users, influence of an engineer working on that team is 900M/100 = 900K.

At Wetpaint, there are 3 engineers working on the wetpaint.com website. Last month, we had 12 million readers. Influence of each engineer = 12M / 9 = 1.3M.

If you’re looking for your job to have influence – right out of the gate – work in a small, isolated team that has full control over its destiny. Startups are by definition structured this way.

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3 thoughts on “Influence of Your Work on the World”

It’s my experience that, as I get older, the scope of the impact is irrelevant compared to its depth. I’d rather change one person’s life than be a footnote on thousands of lives. Being a coach and now a parent, this has become even more obvious to me.

Alex, I like the general premis of your article. The other component your model is missing is the level you are involved in. Lets say Sinofsky had much greater impact on Office shipping than an individual engineer.

Typically, when people choose between places they work, the alternatives often have different seniority/expectations and largely influence levels.